Deanna and Alfonso Campos, parents of two young adults shot in a witness-murder plot in Ocoee, react to recent revelations about the home confinement program that was supposed to be monitoring alleged mastermind Bessman Okafor.

Deanna and Alfonso Campos, parents of two young adults shot in a witness-murder plot in Ocoee, react to recent revelations about the home confinement program that was supposed to be monitoring alleged mastermind Bessman Okafor.

Jeff Weiner, Orlando Sentinel

The criminal allegations against Nolan Bernard could put him in prison for life. But on Monday, it was his tenuous link to Orange County's home-confinement program — through its most damning failure, the case of Bessman Okafor — that he was worried about.

"Guilt by association is an idea we're all familiar with," Bernard's lawyer Andrew Clark said in court, arguing his client should not be tried alongside Okafor, Bernard's co-defendant in a May home invasion who was later accused of killing a witness while on confinement.

Illustrating how toxic the Okafor case and the resulting scandal have become, Clark remarked that Bernard, who has been in jail and is not implicated in the slaying, should be tried "independent of that nightmare and storm of controversy."

The reviews and other public records document the failures in monitoring Okafor, who authorities say masterminded the Sept. 10 slaying of 19-year-old witness Alex Zaldivar.

Along with records already released, the reviews confirm the problems were widespread, and some within the program knew it was in peril long before Zaldivar was killed.

'Privatization' fears

Two recently completed reviews of home confinement — one by the county, another by internal-affairs investigators — add up to more than 100 scathing pages of misconduct.

Amid the finger-pointing in the reviews was an array of serious allegations, including that management pressured staff not to report defendants' home-confinement violations.

The pressure, lower-ranking staff said, was about numbers: "... we wanted our program to look strong... so that we wouldn't possibly be ... privatized," field officer Kenya Cox said.

Said case manager Meg Hughes: "... we were told we were going to 'work with people' and 'keep our numbers' up so violations for drugs or 'stuff like that' we didn't violate them."

Confinement staff were supposed to report any violations to a judge, who typically would issue an arrest warrant — removing that person from the program.

Both Hughes and Cox said Garnett Ahern, home-confinement-unit supervisor, was the source of that pressure. Ahern denied that when interviewed by internal affairs, but others corroborated it.

Orange County Commissioner Fred Brummer, generally a privatization advocate, said he wasn't aware of any serious discussion about privatizing home confinement.

"When someone has screwed up as badly as they have, there's no question you expect them to grasp for any excuse to make up for what is a horrific, horrific error," he said.

The reviews also showed that confinement staff testified thatautomated email alerts for most types of confinement violations were deliberately disabled.

"At best, Ms. Ahern created a level of acceptance in the eyes of her subordinate staff regarding the allowance of offenders to violate" home confinement, the IA review says.

"At worst, she may have even encouraged it."

Staff didn't agree

The reviews were sparked by an Orlando Sentinel report in Februarythat revealed Okafor had potentially violated his court-ordered curfew more than 100times.

In one excursion on Sept. 10, police say, Okafor and two other men shot three people in the Ocoee home where the May attack took place to prevent them from testifying at trial the following day.Zaldivar was killed, and siblings Brienna and Remington Campos were each shot in the head but survived.

In less than three months on home confinement, Okafor tallied 109 "curfew alerts." But an internal-affairs report shows confinement staff couldn't agree on how many qualified as violations — or explain why none were reported to a judge.

Cox, Okafor's field officer, noted in records that there were"major" curfew violations in August but never told his judge. Cox, Ahern, Hughes, Juanita Beason, an administrative supervisor, and Community Corrections Manager Cindy Boyles were found in violation of various policies in the reviews and are awaiting discipline.

Deputy Chief Jill Hobbs, who internal affairs said failed to act on the concerns of her staff, and Corrections Chief Michael Tidwell, who wasn't implicated, are both stepping down soon. Tidwell announced his retirement the day the reviews were released.

Brienna and Remington Campos' parents,Deanna and Alfonso Campos, said they are outraged thatit took an act of brutality to bring the issues to light.

"It took the loss of one and the change in [the] lives of many to get [Corrections] to even look at something they should have been doing from the top all the way down to the bottom," Deanna Campos said.

Too trusting?

An internal-affairs report shows investigators were alarmed by the tendency of Okafor's home-confinement personnel to accept hisexplanations.

For example, Okafor's ankle monitor required a working phone line, but his line was often out of service. Home-confinement personnel accepted his assurances that it was a Bright House Networks issue — but never confirmed that with the company.

In reality, internal affairs determined, Bright House had permanently disconnected Okafor's service months before he was put on confinement. It's unclear who was really providing his phone service or where he was during the outages.

Cox, while investigating one such connectivity problem, accepted the defendant's sister's assurances that Okafor was at home without speaking to him.

That incident is alarming, but not novel: A Sentinel public-records request found a similar incident two years ago, involving several of the same people.

In September 2011, Cox and Hughes reported a defendant to Circuit Judge Mike Murphy after a lengthy curfew violation. The next day, the defendant and his mother told another home-confinement-unit member, Milt Clark Sr., that the defendant had been at a doctor's appointment during the violation.

Without documentation to prove that, Clark sent an email to Murphy, accepting the excuse. Clark was later reprimanded.

Clark explained his error in an email to Cox and Hughes: "As I told [Ahern], my problem is when I talk with the Mother of a Client I assume that everything she says is the truth."

For days before the Sept. 10 slaying of Alex Zaldivar, Bessman Okafor was a wanted man.

He failed to attend a Polk County court hearing Aug. 21. Orange County home-confinement personnel knew that and told him to “stay out of trouble” but didn’t report it to Okafor’s judge in Orange, who could have issued a warrant for his arrest.

A Polk County judge issued a warrant for the failure to appear, which was “active” by Sept. 6, records show. Field officer Kenya Cox sent the Orange County Sheriff’s Office to arrest Okafor at his house the next day, but he didn't answer the door.

Internal-affairs investigators asked Cox and case manager Meg Hughes: Why didn’t they ask Okafor’s judge to revoke his home confinement after his failure to appear?

Cox said Okafor couldn’t be revoked for the new warrant because the Polk County traffic offense occurred before he was on the Orange program.

Hughes said Okafor could be violated only after he was arrested on the Polk County warrant.

IA concluded that both the failure to appear and the fact that Okafor wasn’t found when Orange deputies arrived to arrest him would have justified the revocation of his pretrial release — which could have landed him back in jail.

Timeline: Bessman Okafor’s home-confinement violations

Here are some important 2012 dates relating to the monitoring of Bessman Okafor from records contained in two recent county reviews. Curfew alerts indicate when Okafor’s monitoring equipment reports he may be away from home without permission. This list reflects only the lengthiest of his 109 alerts.